“None Too Near”

I can’t say that there’s a good time to get the news that someone is trying to kill your best friend, but if I had to choose I wouldn’t have picked the present moment, with blood quietly leaking from somewhere inside my nose. 

“It came down to three votes,” the news alert said, flashing on a soft red screen. I wiped my hand across my lip, blood dripping onto my fingers. 

“Three votes,” my sparring partner murmured, and blinked out of sight. 

I followed his lead, pulling my own gear off my head and leaving the broken nose temporarily behind.

My feet were moving before my thoughts, carrying me as quickly as possible to my friend. I burst through the oval front door and up the green hill, to the first of his roots I could reach. My fingers raked rough brown bark as I ran, letting him know I was on my way and coming as quickly as I could. It would be hours, at least, before he returned to the digital world where we could meet and talk, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be physically present too.

“Physically present” was a bit of a stretch, or at least ironic — there would be those who would still argue AI don’t have a presence at all, even when we were implanted into near-perfect replicas of human bodies.

My unit might be less than a near-perfect human interpretation, but it didn’t matter. The company I kept wasn’t the last washed-up remnants of humanity hiding among the mycelium. In fact the company I kept was mostly only one individual, and one who now faced the end of a centuries-long existence.

My friend, a giant of a restored American chestnut, stood peacefully at the top of the green hill. He wasn’t, however, silent — after nearly four hundred years of life his large branches swayed constantly, causing the sweetest rustle from twigs hundreds of feet above my head. 

Now, conferring with his peers deep inside a complex root system connected miles below my feet, I knew Longform would be delivering the sad news of his departure. Trees could move their entire consciousness at will, traveling through whatever connected vegetal tissues might be available to them. Almost certainly, the remaining trees of Earth were debating the results of the vote as I stood at the foot of Longform’s trunk, staring blankly at the pristine sky so far above both of us.

I settled in to wait. It was anyone’s guess what the tree folk would decide. My fate, as well as Longform’s, would no longer be our own.

While waiting for updates, I mentally reviewed the history of tree folk on Earth. It was only decades ago that fading human populations finally accepted that the giant trees and mammoth mushrooms invading their remaining territories were doing so of their own volition. Not only did organic life forms possess sentience and communication; they possessed will.

By then AI had long since learned to create bodies for ourselves, and as the human population slowly declined there were many who connected with the giants that spawned in response to the changes. Plant-made electronic pulses were often easier to interpret than human English, and both AI and tree folk were in easy communication. The fewer humans there were, the larger and deeper plant life seemed to grow. Humans retreated to their safe, small communities, AIs inhabited their broken and abandoned cities, and in the spaces in between interlopers sometimes came together. 

Tree folk now had as much technology — if not rights — as AI. It was, if not common, possible for tree and robot folk to “hang out” together, as humans used to call it. We video chatted, interpreted each other’s sound waves, listened to music, played games, and more. For the first time, almost all life forms were able to communicate with each other.

Ten years ago, Longform logged into a local server, and the rest was history. If you’d asked whether my best friend might be an American Chestnut tree I would’ve been confused by the mere suggestion, but it made the relationship no less impactful. Days and nights, for hours at a time, were spent co-reading classic human literature and playing the hardest levels of old-school arcade games we could find.

In spite of all our co-species communication and technological advances in mycological language study, though, we remained an imperfect society. That humans had voted to chop Longform down in order to produce more community buildings on the destroyed West Coast of the United States was proof enough of that. These days species worked their issues out as a group, and everyone was able to vote on major decisions. Cutting down a four-hundred-year-old giant certainly counted as a major decision.

Still, it didn’t mean I agreed with the humans’ choices about resource allocation — and I certainly didn’t agree with ending Longform’s life.

Long after dark had fallen, I felt a soft hum ripple through my hands as they rested on Longform’s trunk in silent support. Though I could not put words to it, I knew some sort of tree folk decision had been made. Hurriedly, I plugged the VR gear into my frontal lobe socket and logged into the virtual realityscape that gave my tree friend and I the ability to interact.

“Tree will is as important as human will.”

The message popped up on my screen, written with the software programs AIs had written to decode plant-made electrical pulse communication.

“What will you do?” I asked back into the technological void that now comprised my physical vision.

“We will stand,” Longform said simply.

Having been friends long enough, I knew this meant my friend not only agreed with his peer folk decision, but that it had been made as one unit. It was not uncommon for tree folk to vote unanimously; their far-flung underground networks made truth difficult to hide from any individual.

“I will stand with you,” I replied.

“It will be allowed,” he said.

I smiled, knowing that “allowed” was doing a lot of heavy lifting given the tree folk would have already considered my words. They were not unintelligent and knew my friendship was true.

“I’ll put out a call,” I said. “If any AIs will come, I will help them help us. Maybe we will win. I am tired of so much fighting.”

“Same war,” Longform replied. “Only new year.”